Deeplinks Blog posts about WIPO

Eighteen months ago, we heard that the controversial proposed WIPO
Broadcasting Treaty was not on the radar of U.S. congressional
representatives. That has changed, thanks to
href="http://action.eff.org/site/Advocacy?id=227">your
letters, and much hard work by
href="http://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/NGO_joint_statement_SCCR_S1.pdf">
a broad coalition of public interest NGOs, libraries, ICT industry
groups and CE corporations . Late last week, the Chairman and the
Ranking Republican Member of the key Senate
Judiciary Committee weighed in. They
href="http://eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/letter_leahy_specter_pto.pdf">sent a letter to the Register of
Copyrights and Director
of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which make up the U.S.'s
delegation to WIPO, expressing their concern with how the current

This last week at WIPO has brought a series of welcome surprises. When the proceedings started on Monday, we had a Chairman who was new to both WIPO and the Development Agenda. The Member States faced a battery of 40 proposals that had to be reconciled into a unified document. To everyone's surprise, that happened by week's end. That WIPO was able to produce such a document is amazing. That the document is a powerful affirmation of many key parts of the original Development Agenda proposal is nothing short of astounding.

In the past, WIPO's process of closed-door "informal" meetings between countries has usually served to weaken strong public interest proposals. But this week, though most of the negotiation happened behind the scenes, the final product contains an array of policies for strengthening development concerns at WIPO. For example:

WIPO's Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a WIPO Development Agenda is meeting in Geneva this week to continue discussions about establishing a Development Agenda for WIPO - a set of proposals for measuring the impact of WIPO's work on social and economic development in its member states. Two years after they started, the Development Agenda discussions now involve a wide-ranging set of proposals, including requiring WIPO to recalibrate its technical assistance program (WIPO's practice of advising developing countries on how to set up their IP systems), and to develop mechanisms to protect the Public Domain. The discussions may be obscure, but they are important. The WIPO Development Agenda offers the possibility of creating global intellectual property laws that balance rightsholders' interests with the human rights of the world's citizens for access to medicine and knowledge.

It's been just over a week since the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights met in Geneva with the intention of finalizing a new signal-based Broadcasting Treaty to be the basis of negotiations at an inter-governmental Diplomatic Conference scheduled for November. However, after three days of intense meetings, it's impossible to say with any certainty what a new version of the treaty would say.

The 183 member states of the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization are gathered in Geneva this week to discuss the controversial draft WIPO Broadcasting Treaty. EFF's main concern with the current treaty draft - shared by the other 40 public interest groups, companies and industry groups that have submitted a joint statement to WIPO this week - is that it is not limited to signal theft.